AMD's much talked about six-core processors, the Phenom II X6 series, consists of three models for what we know in good detail: model numbers 1075T, 1055T, and 1035T at the bottom. But what remained a mystery were their clock speeds. A leak by one of the motherboard manufacturers who recently released supportive BIOS updates reveals the clock speed for the entry-level Phenom II X6 1035T to be 2.60 GHz, that of the 1055T to be 2.80 GHz, and of the high-end 1075T to be 3.00 GHz. As revealed earlier, the 1035T has a TDP of 95W, while the 1055T has both 125W and 95W variants in the making, and the 1075T has a TDP of 125W.

With so many motherboard vendors specifically designing their upcoming products to be ready for "140W TDP", it isn't hard to guess that there could be a higher-end part in the making, which is probably clocked even higher, and comes with the Black Edition branding. All Phenom II X6 processors are based on the "Thuban" core, a port of the Istanbul six-core architecture to the AM3 package. There are six cores with dedicated 512 KB of L2 caches and a shared 6 MB L3 cache (total cache being 9 MB). The new chip will be announced in the weeks to come.

6 cores, 3.0 GHz and 125W TDP? Sounds nice to me. If AMD manages to keep the price under 300 bucks, these processors could kick some Intel ass. Pair a Thuban with the upcoming Crosshair IV Formula (which looks sweeet from the previews I've seen) and a 58X0 and you've got a kick-ass rig

With Opterons - Istanbul core and Phenoms II - Thurban, Zosma and Deneb CPU cores a new 4th stepping is introduced reducing TDP. AMD has made a wise choice of introducing only 125 TDP CPU's and therefore expending CPU compatibility to AM2+ and AM3 motherboards. Furthermore the existing X4 965 140 - 125 TDP presented a competition between CPU's itself and that is why at this point in time AMD went with only 125 TDP CPU's. AMD Zosma x4 960T is Thurban X6 CPU.

AMD every 3 - 4 months introduces new stepping reducing TDP and increasing CPU clocks by an average of 100 - 200 Mhz depending on the core and the line of the CPU's.

Ethically speaking - writing the article should have been moved to a section that covers broader range of hardware related industry practices, hardware specifications and comparisons of upcoming and existing hardware due the exceptional relevancy of the post for the members of the techpowerup.com forum